Every time Pakistan and India resume talking to each other, the bilateral dialogue process hardly gets off the ground before it crashes down under the weight of their mutual differences and hostilities. What can be done to reverse this start-stop process – something which has become one of the most consistent trends in Pak-India ties over the decades?

The pessimists would say that the situation is irretrievable. Without first changing almost everything that binds, or separates, the two countries, their talks cannot move forward. The changes they advocate include changes in geography (to allow a united Kashmir to become a part of either of the two countries or go independent), transformation of their domestic politics (to create a genuinely pro-people welfare polity in the two countries which disallows the institutions of national security to become heavily invested in keeping the bilateral conflict going) and a revision of history (to change the textbooks in the two countries to get rid of the mutually hostile historical accounts of not just their creation but also their subsequent wars and non-war relations). Certainly a tall order and the one that many have written about but no one has so far been so sanguine as to claim that this could be achieved even in parts. When so much has to change the end result can never be predicted, let alone guaranteed, and the champions of the change perhaps know this.

Short of trying to change everything to change the existing state of Pakistan-India relations, the two sides can at least invest in a process of institutionalising their talks in such a way that they have enough in-built shock-absorber to sustain themselves through hard time. Such an institutionalisation essentially involves creating the office of a permanent representative each in the two countries to take the ownership of their bilateral talks, investing political authority in the talks by bringing political leaders, human rights activists, intellectuals, traders, investors and industrialists in them to increase transparency and infuse a people’s perspective in them and, perhaps most fundamentally, ridding them of their news value so that they can take place quietly away from the click and glare of news cameras.

What happens in the absence of such an institutionalised process is what we already see.

Without the permanent representatives, the talks are mainly handled by bureaucrats whose main job is to maintain the status quo on bilateral ties rather than come up with ways and means to change or challenge it. The other drawback with the absence of an institutional mechanism is that it makes the dialogue process heavily dependent on the will and determination of the political leaders of the two countries. Individually, perhaps, no leader in the two countries is willing to keep their bilateral relations in the quagmire they are now but on an official level they are so beholden to their internal politics that seldom, if at all, they muster the courage to take a groundbreaking step. And since no political leader in the two countries can be permanently in power, there is no guarantee that a process of normalising and improving the ties started under one set of politicians will survive their ouster from power. In fact, every time, a new administration has taken charge in each country, it has preferred to re-invent the wheel vis-à-vis the Pak-India ties.

Secondly, in the absence of a larger participation of political parties, civil society, traders and investors and intellectuals, Pak-India talks assume almost a surreal character – something that has to happen but we do not know why. With individuals and groups from the societies at large becoming a part of the process, people should be better able to know what the normalisation and improving of bilateral ties could entail for their well being. Such an involvement can also perform another important function of making the dialogue process transparent and open, leaving little room for the real or imagined deals and compromises. Without it, the dialogue process hardly ever gets political traction and almost always invokes the charges of a sell-out whenever there is a breakthrough on any issue, mainly because such a breakthrough always happens with some back-channel diplomacy which can neither be transparent nor enjoys the political backing of the people of the two countries.

And, lastly, the talks should happen so frequently and at so many different levels that they do not always make top headlines whenever and wherever the two sides meet. At least sometimes, it is because of the intense media spotlight that the two sides fail to take bold steps for improving their ties, fearing public backlash. Because they meet so sporadically, secretaries or ministers are always accompanied by a large media contingent whenever they cross the border with newspersons sniffing for even the slightest changes to their body language, their words and the contents of their interactions with their counterparts.

Not that the approach being advocated here is like creating everything from scratch. Actually it has been practiced in parts in the past, though admittedly with mixed results. Like, for instance, Pakistan and India had both designated their national security advisors in 2000s to take charge of their bilateral dialogue process and, if former foreign minister Khursheed Kasuri is to be believed, they came quite close to making some kind of a breakthrough on Kashmir. It is important that the office of a permanent representative – with its own permanent staff – takes charge of the dialogue process focusing exclusively on the bilateral dialogue process rather than the security advisors who by the very nature of their jobs are focused on national security issues. Such an office should help create an institutional memory to transform the talks into an incremental process aimed at creating tangible changes instead of moving in circles as they do now without any reference to anything agreed to or decided in the past.

Even the inclusion of the representatives from political parties, civil society, intelligentsia and business and industry is not without precedence. Whenever leaders of the two countries have crossed the border to land in the other country on some landmark occasion like the Lahore summit in 1990s or Agra summit in 2000s, they were accompanied by a large group of people from a cross section of the societies in their respective countries. The difference being that in the mechanism being advocated here these representative get a permanent seat on the negotiation table through their appointments as senior members of the office of the permanent representative. Their tenures – as well as that of the permanent representative – should be fixed for say, five years, so that domestic political changes do not scuttle the previously made gains in the talks.

On taking care of the media aspect, a prominent Indian politician, Mani Shankar Aiyar, once came up with the wonderful idea that Pakistan and India should meet five days a week – and at all possible bureaucratic and political levels – on their border between Wahga and Attari without having to cross into the other country. “Let there be a table right on the borderline with each side sitting on its respective territory.” Whether this is doable or not, his argument is not entirely without merit at least in the sense that something has to be done to keep the negotiators away from the media and its generally aggressive coverage of the dialogue process.

Badar Alam is editor of the political monthly magazine, Herald.